De Emily Reynolds - Toward a Thoery of Intimacy

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Socially Constructing Sexuality: Toward a PostmodernistTheory of Sexual IntimacyEmily M. Reynolds

Brigham Young UniversityAb stract: Drawing on postmodern trends such as herme-neutics and social constructionism, this paper takes issuewith the biological focus of traditional theories of sexuality,arguing that such theories are characterized by a reduction-ism which precludes meaningfulness and an individualismwhich precludes genuine intimacy. They thus offer anessentially barren account of what is otherwise a richlymeaningful h um an activity. A more fruitful account ofhuman sexuality begins with acknowledging that sexualityis a fundamentally social and meaningful phenomenon andthat it can only be understood in the social, historical andmoral context in which human beings live and act. If thelinguistic aspect of sexuality were at the heart of our theo-ries, biological information could be given its proper placeas context for our understanding . Some implications ofcoming to terms with the moral context for our theories arebriefly explored.

Few topics seem to belong so rightly to the domain of psychology ashum an sexuality. Requisite to our very existence and tightly woven intothe fabric of human relationships, sexual intimacy is inseparable fromhum an life. From the much popularized (and much misunderstood)Freudian theories of psychosexual development to Faulconer's (1991)suggestion that sexuality is the best root metaphor for all human inti-macy, our understanding of human sexuality has been central to ourunderstanding of ourselves.From the point of view of postmodernism, it is therefore intenselyironic that prevailing theories of sexuality reflect so little of what is mosthum an about us. In a general way, traditional theories of sexuality fallprey to the same criticisms which postmodernists make of virtually allmainstream psychology. In the particular, I will outline here a few of themost telling problems with current theory and sketch the beginnings of apostmodern alternative.It may go without saying that anyone taking a postmodern approach to


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Socially Co nstruc ting Sexuality 39this topic will likely have rejected the subject-object distinction uponwhich our usual conceptions of objectivity are founded. Not claiming tobe objective, then, it seems important to be explicit here about thegrounding, both experiential and conceptual, of the arguments I wish tomake.

One important element of my perspective on these issues is my experi-ence of seventeen years of marriage. My view of the problems with cur-rent notions of sexuality has its origins in their failure to adequately cometo terms with the richly intimate experiences which are familiar to me.Put another way, prevailing views of human sexuality do not provide avocabulary in which I can make a sensible account of my relationalworld.This failure is most conspicuous when I try to describe my relationshipwith my husband, but it also manifests itself in descriptions of all otherrelations. I feel it keenly when I try to help my seven children understandand talk about sexuality and relationships. In parenting , as in therapy orin close friendships, one can see that the ways we talk about our sexualityhave profound relational consequences. I have come to care deeply abouttalking in ways that enhance and facilitate close, loving, vital relation-ships both in my family and between the members of my family and our

network of extended family and friends. I will argue that prevailing viewsof sexuality make nonsenseor at least a very strange kind of senseofsuch relationships.By way of conceptual grounding, I am building on the work of scholarsof various persuasions within the larger domain of postmodernism . Theseinclude hermeneuticists such as Heidegger and Gadamer, social construc-tionists including Harre', Gergen and Gergen, and writers in philosophyof science such as Robinson, Bohm and Feyerabend. Also important aremany among the growing ranks of psychologists whose work is informedby the scholars I have named and like-minded others.With that much context sketched in, then, we turn to specific issuessurrounding hum an sexuality. It is not possible in this setting to deal withtheories of sexuality in detail and some fairly sweeping generalizationswill therefore be necessary. The first of these is tha t prevailing theories ofsexuality invoke descriptions of hum an sexual behavior w hich are biologi-cal in focus. In some cases, biology is taken to interact w ith social learn-ing, time (usually in the guise of development) or o ther factors, but in one

form or ano ther it is virtually om nipresent. One possible exception to thisis a reading of Freudian psychoanalysis which takes the sex drive to bepsychical rather than biological. In general, however, in both academicand popular usage, the term "d rive " means something biological. In cur-rent introductory psychology texts (cf. Atkinson, Atkinson & Hilgard,1983, Gleitman, 1991, or M yers, 1989) the sex drive is frequently groupedwith hunger and thirst and explicitly defined as having to do with bodilytension.


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40 Theor. & Philo. Pysch. Vol. 12, No. 1, 1992For the purposes of this analysis, variations on the physiology themeinvolving variable interactions or placement of the drive in the mindrather than the body are superficial in any case, for in one way or ano ther,

all such theories claim (though not always explicitly) to describe somecausal substrate, almost always a biological one, which ultimatelyaccounts for sexual behavior. From there, it seems inevitable to concludethat what's "really" going on when humans engage in sexual activity isthe hormone secretions or the drive reduction which the theory takes tobe primary. The rest of what we see or experience is dismissed as unim-portant or in some sense epiphenomenal and the best descriptions ofbehavior are thus those which reduce the behavior to the terms of thecausal substrate.Reductionism in general has been roundly criticized for a number ofreasons by several of the writers I mentioned earlier (cf. Robinson, 1985),but perhaps its most salient implication for theories of sexuality is thatreductionism precludes meaningfulness. Explanations in the reductionistmode always take us back, working our way through the proper series ofcausal antecedents, until in the end we are compelled to conclude thatbehavior just is . It happens because it has to, because other things hap-pened, because that's the way things work.From the point of view of postmodernism, where analysis is most fre-quently carried on at the level of meaning, such a conclusion is absurd,and constitutes prima facie evidence tha t we're on the wrong track . Evenat the rather superficial lexical level, one can argue that hormone secre-tions and drive reduction aren't all that's really going on in sexual rela-tions because that's not what we mean when we talk about sexualrelations. The reductionist can, of course, counter that we jus t d idn 'tknow what we were talking about, but the problem goes deeper yet.Early on, Franz Brentano gave us the notion of intentionality(Spiegelberg, 1976), the idea th at consciousness is always consciousness ofsomething, and never just consciousness. In the same way, human actionis always about something, always situated in a tapestry of relationshipswhich give rise to it and m ake it intelligible. The methodological implica-tions of this are beyond the scope of this paper and have been welladdressed by Polkinghorne (1983), Giorgi (1970) and others, but it doesbear pointing out here that reductionism is part of a paradigm whosemethods of investigation pull human actions out of their usual context

and try to deal with them in comparative isolation. The assumption th atreduction is possible (or even desireable) and the methods which decon-textualize human action fit together in an approach to human actionwhich makes meaning impossible to see.David Bohm's (1980) metaphor of the vortex in a stream makes theproblem abundantly clear. Bohm points out that without the stream flow-ing all around it, shaping and creating it, the vortex disappears. It isn't avortex any more; it's just a puddle and a puddle is not a vortex. Likewise,


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Socially Co nstructin g Sexuality 41without the world of lived relational experience flowing all around it,shaping and creating it, sexual intimacy disappears. It isn't sexual inti-macy any more. It's just horm one secretions and drive reductionsandthat 's not the same thing. In fact, I would argue that sexual intimacy isnot a thing at all; it's an act and cannot be understood in terms of things.In the attempt to reduce sexual intimacy to biological things we thus findtha t there isn't any sexual intimacy left to talk about. Its meaning hascompletely disappeared.

Closely tied to the problems of reductionism are difficulties arising outof the individualism which inheres in traditional accounts of sexuality. Adrive (or any other biological cause) is a very individualizing thing . Itprivileges the private experience of the individual, turns embodiment intoa Heidegerrian boxa prison which inescapably separates usand thussustains the longstanding error in scientific psychology of treating theindividual atomistically.

The net result of this is to make genuine intimacy impossible. If I'm inhere with my drive and you're in there with yours, the best we can hopefor is some kind of negotiated settlement that minimizes the conflictsbetween us. Techniques for inducing drive reduction in one's partnerbecome the coin of the realm and if we learn such techniques we are in abetter position to negotiate. But all we can trade for is reduction of ourown drives because that's all that's available in this marke t. Sexual inti-macy in this system can only be euphemism for the arrangement by whichyou keep my drives reduced and I do the same for yours. We are fools ifwe settle for such poverty.

Given this overview, brief though it has been, I hope it is apparent tha tprevailing theories of sexuality are characterized by a reductionism whichprecludes meaningfulness and an individualism which precludes intimacy.In the absence of genuine alternatives, the fact that there are those whofind such preclusions unacceptable could be waved aside as irrelevant andmaybe even sentimental. W ith the rise of postmodernism, however, theconceptual foundation has been laid for a very different view.In rejecting the metaphysics of traditional psychology, postmodernismchanges the context within w hich we consider trad itional theories of sexu-ality. Against the backdrop of meaningful hum an action, the language ofbiology and drives can no longer be seen as belonging to some ultimateexplanatory substrate. Instead, traditiona l theories (including the notion

of causal substrates itself) provide jus t one possible account of a particularhum an activity. As I have argued above, it is an impoverished account.W hat is needed is a theory of sexual intimacy which gives adequate atten-tion to the physiological aspects of sexuality bu t does not forfeit meaningand intimacy in the traditional way. It is to the possibility of such a the-ory that we now turn our attention.Drawing on hermeneutics and social constructionism, this new viewcould take as its central premise the idea that sexual relations, like all


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42 Theor. & Philo. Pysch. Vol. 12, No. 1, 1992hum an actions, are fundamentally social and meaningful rather than indi-vidual and biological. On this view, sexuality is a language of intimacy;every sexual act is performed in a relational context which gives it mean-ing and makes it what it is.Part of what this means is that actions which would seem to be identi-cal in terms of biology are not the same action at all when they are per-formed in differing contexts. H ar re ' (1983) asserts that "there areumpteen things that people can be doing when they do . . . one biologicalbehavioral thing." Giving tha t one behavior its proper place in the mean-ingful social world is a matter of contextual interpretation, as Gergen(1988) has shown us with the illustration of holding his arm above hishead. As we explore the meaning of his position, we find tha t it changesaccording to the relative position of the other person in the situation. Wemake a very different interpretation if we see someone cowering in frontof him than we do if we see someone looking up past his hand to a kittenin a tree.

In part, it is this kind of difference which distinguishes lovemakingfrom rape . It is also the kind of difference which distinguishes sexualrelations between married partners from those between unmarried part-ners or, at a more subtle level, intercourse in the presence birth controlmeasures from intercourse in the absence of birth control measures.Though co itus may occur in every setting, each is a different act. Themeaning of each act is informed both by its contextual commonalitieswith the others and by its contextual contradistinction to them.

It is important to understand that the differences here described areneither the result of private, internal states of the people involved nor ofphysical, external differences in the environment. They inhere, instead, inthe whole relational network in which the act takes place, a networkwhich includes not only the two people who engage in sexual relations,but other people with whom they are in relation and the shared meaningswhich help to define the comm unity to which they belong. In such asetting, the distinction between internal and external is purely conversa-tional, and not taken to refer to metaphysically separate categories. (Thispoint will receive further attention later on.)Another important aspect of this view is that the words we use todescribe our actions are an important part of what the actions mean to us.This is probably why, in drafting this paper, I found myself consistently

using terms like "sexual behavior" or "sexual activity" when talkingabout traditional theories, but switching to "sexual intimacy" or "sexualrelations" when discussing the postmodernist alternative.To one steeped in the tradition, it is tempting to dismiss these differ-ences in terminology as "merely" semantic, but that misses the very pointI am trying to make, that semantic differences are very important ones.We create ou r world, in large measure, by the words we use to describe it.Harre' (1983) shows us that what we call a handshake is something very


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Socially Co nstruc ting Sexuality 43different from what it would be if we called it touching paws, even thoughthe physical act is the same. One description brings with it a wealth ofsocial meaning and context, the other almost none.

For this reason I would suggest that a postmodern theory of sexualitywould avoid the privations of individualism and reductionism partly byusing a vocabulary which broadens the context in which we understandthe phenom ena in question. Such a vocabulary would articulate theinherently relational existence of human beings and the contextual mean-ingfulness of sexual relations and would thus emphasize the linguisticcharacter of sexuality itself.The use of such a vocabulary requires a reconsideration of virtuallyeverything. An im portant example is found in the question of biology.At first glance, the view I propose may leave the traditional psychologistasking what is to be done with the biological events of sexual activity. Ifthe analysis of human action is carried on at the level of meaning, whatabout all those hormones and bodily tensions? W hat about the concretephysical experience of sexual relations?To understand the answer, it is crucial to realize that one of thehallmarks of postmodernism is that it encounters as wholes many thingstha t have traditionally been split apa rt. On the old view, it would make

sense to talk about the physical sexual act as one thing and its meaning asano ther. Thus, to start talking about the meaning would be to stop talk-ing about the physical act. This view requires tha t an explicit connectionbe made to keep the meaning attached to the act in some way and suchconnections have often proven elusive and difficult or impossible to main-tain, which is why meaning may be dismissed as epiphenomenal on theold view.On the new view, by contrast, act and meaning are inseparable. Actsare meaningful; there are no meaningless acts and there are no meaningswithout acts. It's almost too obvious, but needs emphasizing, that hum anacts are performed by hum ans and, generally speaking, we only encoun terhum ans who are embodied. The details of our em bodiment a re, in fact,essential to our humanness, our gender and many less global aspects ofhow we are situated in the world.On this view, then, the biological aspect of sexual expression is alreadyan inseparable part of the picture because it is integral to human embodi-ment and such embodiment constitutes a necessary but not sufficient con-

dition for human being and thus for human sexuality. This makes adifferent kind of place for biological information in our theories. Ratherthan invoking a causal substrate, it provides context, helping us to under-stand our embodiment and contributing to the meaning of our actions.xA similar shift can be seen in the way we talk about things like "indi-viduals" and "selves". Rather than refering to any self-existent entity,these terms as used in a postmodern theory have more to do with posi-tioning us in relation to others. The social construction ists have given us


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44 Theor. & Philo. Pysch. Vol. 12, No. 1, 1992the possibility tha t we were simply wrong to think of ourselves as atomis-tic individuals in the first place, that selves are only possible in relation-ships, as expressions of those relationships. This position is strengthenedby the emphasis on language and meaning, which are intrinsically socialand shared. We only have language as we learn it in a relational world,already full of meaning and possibility. Taking our place in the conversa-tion is impossible to do alone; there has to be someone to converse with.There is thus a sense in which, from our earliest moments, we are nevergenuinely alone because what we are and how we have the world isalways already in relation to others, whether they are physically presentor not. A truly private, personal language (or experience) is impossible,since any language I might contrive could only be private in contradis-tinction to the social, shared language we already had and would thushave meaning to meand to othersas a departure from that sharedlanguage.

An emphasis on the linguistic character of sexuality thus frees us fromthe problems of individualism discussed earlier. To start with, you are nolonger over there with your drive and I over here with mine. Instead, weare doing something together which is always already meaningful and thequestion (usually asked and answered implicitly) is, What does it mean?Of course, one of the meaningful things I can do is to insist tha t I have a"drive" and that you must reduce it, but the meaning and ontologicalstatus of both my insistence and the "d rive " itself are immediately at issueand must be understood in the context of our relationship and the place(s)we have in the larger constellation of relationships with those around us.

On this view, our theory would not invoke the drive as a given becausenothing just is. Fo r m e to interpret my physiological experience as a drive(and you as a drive reducer) is a meaningful act. Sexual intercourse thusconstitutes an account of the relationship within which it takes place. Itis one expression of how we are together. And we understand the mean-ing of that expression by how it is situated in its relational context.The importance of contexts in postmodernism is reflected in metaphorssuch as Harre's (1983) seamless web of meaningful activity, a web whichseems not to have any defineable edges. The intent of such metaphorsmay be a broadening of our context to include everything, an ongoing,flowing everything that is enriched and reunderstood at every turn . Theeffects of this broadening are fairly dramatic in theories of sexuality. If

we move from individualism and reductionism to a view in which sexual-ity is best understood as a language of intimacy and if language is inher-ently contextual, one of the imm ediate consequences is that we confront anumber of issues which have not usually found their way into our theo-ries. Traditionally, all of the aspects of hum an being which a re messy,unmanageable and not easily subjected to scrutiny by scientific methodshave been either lopped off and discarded or operationalized beyond rec-ognition. As soon as we are willing to, however, we see that sexuality is


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Socially Co nstruc ting Sexuality 45laden with social, historical, and moral meaning and that these meaningsmust be dealt with.

The social and historical aspects seem relatively (albeit deceptively)innocuous. Although postmodernism has questioned the adequacy withwhich such issues have been dealt with in psychology, they have at leastcome up in mainstream psychological theory and I'm not going to spendtime on them here. When we get to morality, however, there seem to bemany of us who want to call a halt and insist that we're moving outside ofour legitimate domain. And it's quite clear that this kind of move does,indeed, take us outside of the domain that the traditional mainstream ofthe discipline has carved out for itself.

There are, however, voices (even some from within that traditionalmainstream) that call for a realization among us that we have been mis-taken to experiment on, theorize about, and therapize human beings with-out taking account of the moral (or religious or value-related)situatedness of bo th ou r subjects (or clients) and ourselves. (Fo r a well-publicized exam ple see Bergin, 1991.) There have also been those alongthe way who have tried to address morality and values directly (cf.Rokeach , 1979, and Kohlberg, 1971), bu t it is one thing to m ake values avariable or m orality a m atter of principles (arrived at via old-style episte-mology) and entirely ano ther to acknowledge that all of our questions andall of our answers, indeed all of our human doings, already have a moralcontext and moral consequences.

It would take another paper or two to address even the most pressingimplications of acknowledging our moral context in our theorizing, but Iwant to conclude with a few general comments.The first is that, in the same way that sexual intimacy is an account ofthe relationship in which it takes place, psychological theorizing, experi-menting and therapizing are accounts of the relationships within whichthey take place. These accounts may be moral or imm oral, but neveram oral because they reflect our relations w ith each other as psychologists,our relations with our subjects and clients, and our place in the widerrange of hum an relationships in which we are engaged. To acknowledgethis is to feel the necessity of taking responsibility for the moral implica-tions of our theories, especially as they are lived out in the relationalworlds of our clients and others who are influenced by our speaking, ourwriting, and our own ways of being in relationship.Taking responsibility in this way may make us feel that a great deal isdemanded of usand so it is. One of the most important things to under-stand about this position is that it cannot be understood by an objectivescientist who stands back on the philosophical grounds of traditional met-aphysics and epistemology. Giving up objectivity, metaphysics and allthe rest is not just a theoretical p roposition, it is a very personal one. Itentails thorou gh, integrated engagement in relations. M oral situatednessis a lifelong, 24-hour a day way of being.


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46 Theor. & Philo. Pysch. Vol. 12, No. 1, 1992Finally (and this is the barest sketch of a very im portan t problem ), it isessential to address the meaning of morality itself and of sexual moralityin particu lar. The wholistic spirit of postmodernism would lead us to

avoid a principle-based morality because principles exist as atemporal uni-versal realities in some sphere beyond our own and to posit such a sphereis to split things up again, a move which re-chains us to metaphysicsbefore we have even had time to understand what our freedom from itmight mean. Fo r some, the effort to avoid invoking principles hasresulted in brands of relativism and/or pragmatism which, to my way ofthinking, do not provide a satisfactory account of morality because theyare so open-ended as to allow that virtually anything can be mora l. Ibelieve the case can be made that such an approach does not retain anyimportant aspects of what we have usually meant by morality. The wordjust won't stretch that far.

We must, I think, assume that absolute principles and "anything goes"pragm atism do not exhaust the possibilities. In giving up the epistemol-ogy which requires knowledge to be objective certainty, we open the pos-sibility of knowledge as something much more immediate and obtainableand for a morality which simply inheres in such knowledge. Taking ourlead from writers including Levinas (1969) and Noddings (1984), we maybegin to understand morality as inherent in knowledge if we begin tounderstand knowledge as intimate acquaintance and familiarity. The pos-sibilities opened by this kind of understanding for theories of sexuality areabundant indeed.There is a great deal yet to be done along these lines; virtually everyidea I have mentioned demands further development, but I cannot helpbut feel that the project is well begun when we see that sexuality is afundamentally social and meaningful phenomenon and that it cannot beadequately understood amid the reductionism and individualism of pre-

vailing theory. Our understanding must instead be grounded in thesocial, historical and moral context in which sexual intimacy has itsmeaning.Footnotes

1 One of the ironies of the biological focus of most theories of sexualityis that, in their individualism, they fail to account for one of the mostobvious biological aspects of sexual relations, the possibility of concep-tion. Birth control and abortion allow us to lop off that part of our con-text if we want to, but if we take human beings as they come (and as theymust continue if they are to continue at all) the creational aspect of sexu-ality is very important context.

REFERENCESAtkinson, R. L., Atkinson, R. C , Smith, E. E. & Hilgard, E. R. (1987).


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Socially Co nstruc ting Sexuality 47Introduction to psychology . (9th Ed.) New York: Harcourt BraceJovanovich.Bohm, D. (1980). Wholeness and the implicate order. London: Rout-ledge & Kegan Paul.Faulconer, J. E. (1991). "Neither Greek nor Jew: 'Beyond'the theologyof philosophy and literary criticism." Paper presented in the ParleyChristensen Lecture Series, Brigham Young University, Provo,Utah.Gergen , K. (1988). "If persons are tex ts." In S. B. Messer, L. A. Sass,R. L. Woolfolk (Eds.), Hermeneutics and psychological theory. NewBrunswick: Rutgers University Press.Giorgi, A. (1970). Psychology as a human science: A phenomenologicallybased approach. New York: Harper & Row.Gleitman, H. (1991). Psychology. (3rd Ed.) New York: W.W. Norton& Company.H arre', R. (1983). "A n analysis of social activity." In J. Miller, States ofmind. New York: Pantheon Books.Kohlberg, L. (1971). "F rom is to ought: How to comm it the naturalisticfallacy and get away with it in the study of moral development." InT. Mischel (Ed.), Cognitive development and epistemology. NewYork: Academic.Levinas, E. (1969). Totality and infinity. (A. Lingis, Trans.). Pitts-burgh: Duquesne University Press. (Original work published in1961)M yers, D . G. (1989). Psychology. (2nd Ed.) New York: Worth Publish-ers, Inc. Noddings, N . (1984). Caring: A feminine approach to ethicsand moral education. Berkeley: University of California Press.Polkinghorne, D. (1983). Methodo logy for the human sciences: Sys-tems of inquiry. Albany : State University of New York Press.

Robinson, D. N. (1985). Philosophy of Psychology. New York: Colum-bia University Press.Rokeach, M. (Ed.). (1979). Understanding human values: Individualand societal.Speigelberg, H. (1976). " 'Intention' and 'intentionality' in the Scholas-tics, Brentano and Husserl." In L. McAlister (Ed.), The philosophyof Brentano. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press.

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